The ins & outs of Stephan Pyles

While I was in Dallas the week before last, I finally had a chance to check out the eponymous new restaurant of Stephan Pyles.

Stephan Pyles–the restaurant–opened last year on Ross Avenue in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, just a few blocks north of the West End club and restaurant mecca. It made a big splash with its ambitious global fusion menu and its sleek, aggressively handsome room, a grid-disciplined space done up in flagstone, metal and polished, sculpted wood.

The decor is as sexy and grown-up as Pyles’ last flagship restaurant, the kitsch-happy Star Canyon, wasn’t.

The best thing about this engaging room, for me, anyway, was the long bar overlooking the open kitchen and ceviche station (yes, you read that right), plus the amazing community table that greets all comers. It’s the size and shape of a surfboard for Gulliver, set high and surrounded by suitable perches.

Seriously, this convivial-looking table swoops along for about twenty feet, and I would love to see it full on a Friday night. I wish a Houston restaurant would try something similar. It looks likes tons of fun.

It was Monday when I ate at Stephan Pyles: first for lunch, and afterwards for a late dinner. The place wasn’t crowded. It was hard to drive into coming up Ross Avenue, and I am ashamed to say that after futile attempts to find a way around the no-turn zones, I finally made an illegal left into the front drive, where valets take the guilt away.

The menu read really well–as if Pyles had corralled all his global enthusiasms, won by travel and experience, and then married them to his Southwestern basics. It was one of those documents fairly peppered with dishes I longed to try.

I must admit my expectations were high. I remember when Pyles first sank into the Texas consciousness back at his Routh Street restaurant in the mid-1980s, when his lobster enchiladas and hoja-santa-wrapped fish seemed the height of daring and deliciousness. His food–and that of his pioneering Southwestern compatriots, Dean Fearing of the Mansion on Turtle Creek and Robert del Grande of Houston’s Cafe Annie–promised a modern Texas cuisine.

Oh, I sniffed at first, and thought of them as “the cilantro boys.” But their skills won out, and I became a believer. (Like Pyles’s hoja-santa wrapped fish, I still count my first taste of del Grande’s legendary mussel-and-cilantro soup as a major epiphany.)

I liked Pyles’s Baby Routh spinoff, but his later ventures (including a seafood place and the cowboy-crazed Star Canyon) never won me over. My last meal at Star Canyon, which must have been five or so years ago, left me aghast at the cloddish execution his kitchen was laying down. I felt no need to go back, and I was unmoved when the restaurant closed.

By then Pyles was doing wild global tapas stuff at the huge mid-cities Gaylord Texan resort, in a restaurant called Amur Lur. I never got there. To tell the truth, the whole idea made my head hurt.

All of which made me surpassingly curious about what Pyles was up to in his Arts District retrenchment. Here I was–and it looked so good, and the menu read so amusingly.

You know where this is going, right? To kinda-sorta disappointment land.

At lunch, the yellow tomato gazpacho would have been glorious and uplifting had the central trove of “spicy scallops” not been so overburdened with saffron that they had a telltale iodine taint, as if they had been marinated near particularly iodiney shrimp. Saffron is funny that way: kept in check, it can be marvelous stuff. Left to run riot, it can scuttle a dish with its metallic twang.

I was fascinated by a chopped steak that was described as stuffed with foie gras–it sounded like a dream come true–but the reality came a cropper. Salt was the dominant effect, and the beef was none the lusher on account of the fatted liver, which seemed to have been simply massaged into the meat. Basically, it was a decent if unremarkable–and notably salty–hamburger. One that cost $18, complete with house-made, waffle-cut potato chips.

Okay. I was sitting right in front of the guy who composed the ceviches and who also made the desserts, and I had been eyeing the fried-to-order “doughnuts and coffee.” The orbs were so festive, dusted with powdered sugar and piled up onto a skewer with the doughnut holes impaled on top. Underneath was a coffee-infused creme brulee.

What could go wrong, right? Well, there was so much powdered sugar packed on that was all I could taste, and the insubstantial doughnut dough was nothing to write home about. The coffee creme could not stand up to all that sweetness. I was dejected, but only to the tune of seven bucks.

That night–still hopeful–I returned. I wanted to like the place. And after a sampling of ceviches and several nice wines by the glass, I came away much happier. The ceviches were beautifully served, poised in glass bowls atop a chiseled ice floe, and two out of three rang the bells. Halibut with avocado and tomatillos was strangely flat, but the dangerously sweet-sounding hamachi with agave nectar and guanabana was all tropical smoothness and mystery. Sea scallops with golden tomatoes and aji could have used more of the trademark aji chile bounce, but they were not saffroned to distraction, and they came off nicely.

I did think, for a fleeting moment, that I had eaten ceviches more exciting (if less exactingly composed and presented) at Houston’s Cafe Red Onion Seafood y Mas.

The Stephan Pyles service at both lunch and dinner was terrific. That’s often not the case in a big restaurant operating at way less than capacity, but the Monday blues did not strike here.

2 Responses

David: I had forgotten about the one at Ouisie’s. But I guess I was talking about something eye-popping and front and center, like the community table at Stephan Pyles is. It is the first thing you see when you enter, and instead of looking like a place you might roost only reluctantly, it looks like the best seat in the house. You get to see everyone who comes in.

The only community table I’ve ever sat at that really felt like fun was the big table at the center of Cafe Pasqual’s in Santa Fe.

How about you? Do sit at the community table at Ouisies? Like it? Any others in town worthy of note? There’s that gargantuan booth in back at Max’s Wine Dive, where once I saw a big party of sixtysomething lawyers & spouses eating alongside an uncomfortable looking young couple (date night). Wasn’t working.